This may be changing however. While I don't think we'll see it for some time, I do think traffic will play a role in rankings. After all, it does already in sponsored rankings.

Google has been slowly rolling out personalized results. If you have a google account and have search history enabled chances are you are already "victim" to this. Essentially what it means is Google will look at other factors in addition to current algorithmic factors when determining what pages will rank highly.

For example, if you search for "linux" and you have a tendancy to visit Redhat related sites then over time other linux branded sites (such as debian, ubuntu etc) will show up less and less in your results while other redhat sites will start moving up.

This is where traffic could affect the pages you see. Granted the scenario I described here has little to do with traffic but imagine this:

You DON'T have a Google account, but you search for Linux - there is a chance that based on other's search history and the results they clicked, that the pages you see will be influenced. In this case traffic is a factor in rankings. Of course, like I said this scenario is probably a year or more away but I would say it's bound to have an impact.

textlinks the thing you are saying can always be tracked without having a google account because without a redirect also there are chances to know which site you visited but thats not the case as of now.

Yes I agree - simply using an IP and tracking that will yield a certain amount of personalization. But from my point of view, the more data they have on you the more personalized your results will become.

That's why I'm surprised other companys such as Microsoft and Yahoo are so far behind. After all, everyone and his dog has an IM account with loads of personal information, yet they don't seem to use that to personalize search results.

Similar for AOL - they have membership information - which is even more detailed - yet they just use plain old Google organic results, no customization at all.

I totally agree on you. First when there was no google analytics you were not getting in adwords the keyword suggestion tools for some of your competitors are getting traffic for but now you can know what are the keywords where go4expert.com gets maximum traffic from and you can get yourself in the top position for that keywords in sponsored listings.